


Inhumation

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Angst, Burials, Implied Het, M/M, implied self harm, pre-burials era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:54:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2792297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the year every one of them leaves you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inhumation

**Author's Note:**

> This is my pre-burials fic, everyone. But I suppose you gathered that from the title. It wrote itself fast, after hearing IHYS and 17 Crimes. I heard the Conductor and A Slow Deep Panic after this story was mostly written, so I was perturbed by how well they lined up within its constraints. I hope this isn's to miserable too read.

It is the year the glamour chips off, because it is the year every one of them leaves you. 

She’s the first, dressed in all black like it’s your funeral, sunglasses on so you can’t even see for yourself that she’s not crying. You can only hear the dryness in her eyes. She sits across from you, on the fuchsia love seat at her new two bedroom apartment that you haven’t fucked in yet because the last few times you’ve seen her, she turned her cheek towards you when you leaned in to kiss her . 

She’s smoking her electronic cigarette, the steam of it billowing between you like special effects on a horror movie set, smoke machines and illusion. You know her electronic cigarette should bother you less than her actual smoking habit, but mysteriously, it bothers you more. You wave your hand between your bodies, imagining what her eyes look like right now, behind her layers of fraud and falsity. She has managed to surprise you, even though you try to not let anyone touch you with such a thing as surprise. 

“It’s just not fun anymore, Davey,” she says plainly, exhaling with her soft, purple-painted mouth shaped around careful ‘o’. “I’m sorry. It’s just...it ran its course. It’s over.” 

This course she speaks of was one year longer that the ‘course’ you ran with Jade. If you don’t count the part of the course you’re still running, the secret, uphill part at night when everyone else is asleep. She was, in some ways, the first one of these creatures you sewed into your fraying seams when the daylight part of that course ceased. 

Your face is in your hands, and you rub your temples with tired fingers. “You were in this for the fun?” You ask, because ‘fun’ was never a part of any of them, never why you kept this tank full of hissing roaches you could reach into and pull out this night’s selection to let it crawl across your skin. She taps the end of her electronic cigarette, even there’s no ash to fall to the crystal ash tray she has on her mahogany coffee table. 

“Not just the fun,” she says, and her lips smile for a moment, the sad, crisp smile of someone whose already made up their mind. _Not just the fun_ is not _I did love you, once_ , but you can remember what it was like, why she was here for so long. You know her tattoos, the concavity of her back with its dimples your index and middle fingers fit into just so, and hair that falls like liquid through your hands when you would worry it at night. 

“This is because I’m getting older,” you say, aloud even though that was not your intention. But it doesn’t matter now, because this is the end of something. The glamour has chipped off, the glittering part she helped paint you in, gone. Leaving you wooden and ancient and unbeautiful underneath. 

But then she surprises you again, and says “No.” She exhales, filling the space between you with too-pale, scentless smoke that’s not smoke. Then she crosses her legs, her lace-up vinyl leggings creaking and creasing . “It’s because you’re not.” 

You don’t understand at first, because in this moment you feel like the oldest person who has ever lived, especially across the coffee table from her and her smooth, obscured face. However, as you nod in slow, dumb realization that she’s slipping out from underneath you, it feels like throwing a handful of wet, black earth into a six-foot pit. 

\---

After her, two others fall in love. Under different circumstances, you’d be happy for them, because love is still a thing you believe in, still a thing you remember the consuming, devastating magic of, in spite of your own consumption and devastation at its fists. It’s not for you, not anymore, but you want it for other people. You want the young things you keep to fall in love one day, to be swept away in the same fierce river that took you ten years ago and bashed your bones to dust against the shore. You want it for them, but whenever you see the thing they claim is love, you doubt them as you hated to be doubted. It seems hollow, a force they can resist and that was not how you defined love then, how you do now. 

You suspect it can’t be real, if they’re not stripped to blood and ribbons by it. And you know this is unfair, and worse, a cliche. To be the old man dictating the naiveté of youth. But that is what you feel, when you see what they believe to be love. 

And maybe that’s why they’re all dying, dropping one by one to shed skins of nothing before you, as you stand unchanged. Leaving you and your idea of love for their own. 

They say the things young people say when they’re in love for the first time, things they think are original. _It’s crazy, isn’t it? I never thought this could happen. It’s just crazy._ Those glistening, awed smiles, the creases in their cheeks that you don’t remember being there last time you spoke, touched, fucked. Then, of course, after the fact, _you understand, right? Dave?_

And you do. You must, because you were the one who was in love first. You were the one who laid down the terms and agreements you have with this swarm of adoration, this sea of youth. You were the one who designed this life they notched into. And of course, they’re free to leave. And if it wasn’t for her and the hollow echo of her voice repeating _It’s because you’re not_ in you skull, you would watch them go with your own wings outstretched. You’d smile for them, happy for them even though you don’t believe in their version of love and believe them all fools who will eventually return to you older, broken, disposable and tarnished. 

But she was first, first in her sunglasses and new apartment and cloud of scentless steam, falling away from you like something that was never even yours. So when the other two follow, their arms tight around their new loves waists, shoulders, other creatures like the creatures you surround yourself with, the identical smattering of tattoos, the same bottle black hair and slender backs, it seems like and endless procession. So you watch them go, terrified. Hands fluttering over the illusion of smoke, fading from your fingers, leaving no trace. 

You drop handful after handful of soil into this grave, and it only yawns wider, absence growing as you feed it, and with the helpless compulsion of someone who has made something so true for so long that it is now by design, you imagine cupping Jade’s face with your two blackened palms, leaving sooty handprints like ghosts once you let go of him. 

\---

Your list of people you can call to come inside has dwindled by three, which is your favorite number. It takes a few weeks for it to sink in that these options have actually been erased from your remedies for loneliness, that you will never again be able to seek solace in the flesh that found you when you were left lost and lacerated a decade ago. The ache sets in slow, a disease which leaves you stricken and paralyzed. They are parts of you, these people which you can barely even begin to think of as people because they are so innate. They’re parts of you and these parts are empty now, flaking pockets of dry-rot. 

You are not even sure you’re real, if you are a real thing because without these vacancies to give you substance by comparison, how will you know you take up space? How will you know you are not a fiction, if they are not here making you real, receptacles for the seed you plant to grow yourself new limbs? 

He’s the one you call, because he’s been here as long as she has and he loathes you and loves you still, while the rest have faded to something between the two.

He still smokes real cigarettes, but beyond that, there is nothing real about him. He makes your apartment look more furnished, like he is supposed to be there, standing tall and thin and elegant in his black and white striped gauzy button up you can see his tattoos through, like he is a piece of furniture upon which you can hang your coat, a coaster for your mug of tea. He sits slowly and gracefully beside you, like a personified sigh collapsing into your scarlet upholstery. There he slouches, one narrow leg kicked up on the arm of your couch. “You didn’t expect them to stick around like I do, right?” he says, sounding bored. “No one is as pathetic as I am. You have to remember that, Dave. Other people get sick of it.”

“You get sick of it too,” you remind him, thinking of the one million fights you’ve had over the years, the ones where he’s begged to be your only, begged to be different. You haven’t had one of those fight in a long time, though, because they’ve made him hate you much more than he loves you at this point. You are fairly certain you are habits to one another now, even if you are his habit of feeling rather than a habit of lack therof. He can’t speak to you now without insulting you both with a deep, seething disgust. He is one of your closest friends, and you suppose this is the type of person you’ve become. 

“Yeah. I’m sick of it, but I guess I’m just plain sick, too. Because here I am,” His eyes flash, breaking your heart as they always do because they are the youngest, purest, glassiest blue, but the skin around them is years older than you know he is, lined and heavy with darkness. He puts his legs on you, the heel of his boot at your throat for a moment before he’s shifting, climbing atop you so your mouth are sealed, kissing you so hard it’s confusing, because it’s the kiss of someone who still finds you beautiful, festering underneath all the other feelings, and such a thing seems impossible amid all you’ve done to him. 

Fisting in his shirt front, you choke him with your tongue, and he holds your shoulders as you push his body underneath yours. Against you, his skin is warm, and the shock of that makes you want to cry. You used to find the translucence of his skin beautiful, you used to adore the way his ribcage felt frail and breakable beneath your hands. You used to want to slip your fingers beneath all of that into the soup of organs, because he was the perfect imitation Jade, the thin slouching guitarist with his dry wit and wide, cocksucking mouth. 

But now you cringe through touching him, repulsed by how easy it would be to actually break him to pieces. He’s almost nothing, so thin and so pale and so fake. It’s like kissing a ghost. You twist away from the hold of these thoughts, and cradle his skull in both palms, pulling fistfuls of hair as he guides you into of him, face red and broken and blues eyes shut so you can only see the old part. 

You come inside, and he’s wrecked with color on his cheeks, his mouth, his hips where you gripped him until his pallor ripped into something new. “Everything is changing,” you say once the rush of adrenaline falls out of you. You wipe your eyes on the backs of your hands and inhale raggedly, chest still heavy and stuck to his back with a layer of emptiness. “I don’t know what to do.” 

He laughs without humor, and it comes out of his nicotine lungs as a wheeze. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” He doesn’t add _you’re an adult, after all_ and you notice this. 

“Everyone is growing up. They’re all getting lives, and changing and becoming normal.” you say, words bubbling out of you like a mess from a broken sewage pipe, the eloquence you strive for in front of every camera lost with the load you just emptied into him. You’re not sure what you mean, you just know you’re losing pets to responsible homes every day, you’re proving incompetent and out of control. People are choosing stability and the mundane over the Neverland you offer, _suffer the little children come unto me_ , and you have this complex about being left for stability and the mundane. It’s why you surround yourself with youth, it’s why you have pets in the first place. “ They’re all throwing away what it means to be young.” 

“Dave,” he says, throat hoarse with reproach. “You’re not young, you know.” 

You sniff, and shovel mounds of earth into the pit with the whole of your body like you were a shovel. “I know,” you say. 

\--- 

Jade told you almost two years ago that he was going to get married. At first, you were numb with the news. He told you sprawled naked beside you, the light coming through the blinds striping his flesh in bars of pale and shadow. You could not see his eyes, because you weren’t looking at him, and even if you had been, he was covering them with the back of his hand, shutting out the morning and its electric brightness. 

“Dave. Did you hear me?” he said after he told you like it was important and needed repeating, and this time, you did hear him. The numbness dissolved into a stricken feeling; your stomach dropped, your blood iced over with dread and shock but then that passed too. Shifted and melted and heated into the same old, familiar sadness because you knew it wasn’t actually going to happen. That Jade wasn’t going to go through with it, that Jade _never_ kept promises, not to you not to her, not to himself. Jade was weak and pliant and storm-beaten. 

Plus, marriage was an unfathomable thing to you then. Not how you define love. The two syllables (that you only half-believe are two syllables because they seem to blur together messily in the middle of the word,) are foreign in your mouth. Something you see as impossible, because it belongs to and represents a parallel universe you do not inhabit. Things like legality, binding agreements, locked away futures, wives and children and jobs and lawns like die-cut emeralds in front of huge, clean, artless homes, do not interest you. In fact, you abhor them. You always did. A decade ago, Jade did, too. It was part of what tied you together with something much deeper and truer than marriage. 

Then you find our you’re wrong about lots of things. 

In the mail, you receive a letter from Jade and a wedding invitation on the same Wednesday in July nearly two years later, and suddenly, the universe is collapsing into particles. _No_ your everything says. _No._ Just _no_. Nothing beyond one syllable, one solitary gasp of denial because this is impossible, this is not how you define love. 

You are so blind with rage and hurt than you don’t even read the letter, you just call him up, you get in perhaps a minute of shrill, crazed, senseless screaming before he hangs up on you and you listen to his phone ring and ring and ring until it starts going straight to voicemail. You consider driving to his huge, clean, artless home so that you can scream at him there, undivided by air-waves and the crackle of static, a fixture on his die-cut emerald of a lawn. You pace in your living room, your body is full of words but still, in your mind, all there is it the deafening echo of the most lonely _no_ you have ever felt. 

With shaking fingers, you open the letter, which says in so many words that this thing between you, the thing that started ten years ago and ended your life as you had grown to understand it, the thing that _became_ who you were, was over. It had run its course and he was sorry. And that he still wanted you at his wedding, if it was possible. 

You read it a few more times, and realize with an incredible moment of shocked, stumbling humility that you made a mistake in thinking this letter would never come. That Jade would always be there, ebbing and flowing and coming and going, but with the unmistakable certainty of the tide. That sometimes he would leave, and live his life with her in all of its gilded glory, but inside his darkness would grow, infected, and he’d come crawling back to you eventually, veins thrumming with this sick, unkillable loved you shared because there was nothing either of you could ever do to cure the disease of it. He would come and you would fuck and everything would be as it was for a few hours before he would return to his other life. But always, always he would come back, because you were the truth. You were the reality. 

And this was the lie you built. This was how you defined love. 

Changing this thing you’ve carved into your skin until it scarred is not an option. You have to build a new lie, you know that even now, fetal and shuddering and reduced to a single word on endless repeat. But in this moment you would rather die than dig up the grave your vines have grown around. You would rather die. 

Though you are unsure why, you decide that this is the worst thing that he could have ever done to you. It feels like the most devastating betrayal, worse than him leaving, worse then him leaving and staying gone, but maybe that’s only because those are memories and this is now. Or maybe because this is the final, consummate blow in his long-drawn process of leaving, and leaving and staying gone. This is it becoming real, after ten years of Jade wanting it to be real but unable to enforce the rules that would make it so. This is it in the throes of its final death spasm. This is the burial. 

_No_ turns slowly into _How?_ before _How could you?_

You hold your knees to your chest, wracked and split, somewhere between your kitchen and the stairs. Your cheek is imprinted with carpet, and the smell of your house is unrecognizable from this seldom occupied place on your floor. It is a new perspective, seeing this place you call your home become slowly strange as your gaze roves the ceiling, the carpet, the corners where there is a buildup of cobwebs and cat hair even though you do not have a cat. Your breath rattles in and out of you, thick with dust and disbelief. _How could you?_ Says every heartbeat. _How? How? How?_ Then, _No_. 

\---

You wake from a dream of Jade burning your forearm with the head of a lighter, and roll over and find yourselves trapped between two sticky, nude bodies. You lie there for a moment, catching your breath, trying to hold onto the dissipating image of Jade hurting you with such reluctance, such pain, like it was his skin that was puckering and blistering into welts of fluid-filled red. You touch your arm, and there is nothing there. The bodies stir on either side of you, murmuring and amniotic. 

Reaching out with a hand in the dark, you blindly touch the one closest to you, trying to piece together through the haze of fractured sleep who this flesh belongs to. The other one flickers beside you, rolls over, makes a sound between a sob and a sigh in her sleep. 

“What are you doing?” He asks hoarsely, annoyed, fumbling behind him to he can take your hand in his own and deposit it somewhere else that is not his ribcage. “Are you trying to cuddle me or something?” 

Relief prickles in your finger tips, and you push your face into the thin black hair in tattered strands at his neck, inhale his smell of smoke and suffering.“I don’t know what I’m doing,” you whisper, sitting up and rubbing your face with your palms, trying to end this blindness if only for a second so that you can trace the line of his body with your eyes, identify this beating heart and expanding lungs as a human. The light never comes though, so your eyes fabricate things. 

The familiar feeling closes in on you, sharp and oppressive, as if the darkness has hands to crush and choke you with. You need to leave. Then you are climbing over this girl sprawled out on your left, sliding from silk sheets until your cold feet touch cold hardwood. In the blackness your skin feels too tight, as if you are being compressed by your inability to see. Your lungs are two sizes to small, while your heart is massive, swollen to the point of rupture.

“Are you leaving?” He asks sharply, and his voice is different. Clearer, awake. And because panic is a feeling you have become recently acquainted to in a myriad of incarnations and forms and disguises, making you a connoisseur of panic, you think you might hear a note of it threaded into him too. Or maybe that is just you, and you are hearing it everywhere because it’s what you’re fashioned from. 

You stand, invisible in the dark wearing nothing but your tattoos, which he cannot even see right now because there is no moonlight. This map of your histories, your interests and loves and influences, all printed there on your skin for anyone to witness and interpret. But amid all that, there is nothing, not a single scar or suture, to prove that Jade Puget has ever touched you. There is no proof. It could have never happened. You could die tomorrow and the coroner would know things about you, but he would not know the one thing that mattered. 

Air gasps, tight and thick and you choke on it. She makes that sound again, the one between ecstasy and misery and he says your name. Your name under water. Miles away. You suck the dark into your lungs desperately as your heart tries to kill you, this war-drum beat beyond the most desperate of thunders. _What’s happening?_ You think. And then his hands are on your shoulders, his skeletal chest light-house white in the dark. “Are you sick? Do I need to call someone?” He rasps. 

“No,” you try to say, but your teeth are chattering too hard. 

“Christ,” he says. “Let me get you a paper bag or something.”

The lights flick on, needle-sharp and invasive, and you shield your eyes. Only now you recognize the girl, remember her name as second-long flash before you hide illuminates her dyed bangs, her clotted mascara, her face crumpled and ugly in the shock of light. He comes back with a glass of water and no paper bag, a dark, heavy, sleepless purple under his eyes. They are filled to the brim with resentment. 

“Come on,” he says, dragging you to your feet. He tosses you someone’s shirt, and you pull it on clumsily, even though it is too tight and does not fit you. “Go walk it off. Sit in the living room or something. I’ll get some clothes and meet you there in a sec.” He pushes a pair of his own boxers into one of your hands, and the water into the other. “Go.” 

There is another body you hardly recognize sleeping on the couch, so you sit at the bar in the kitchen, taking mouthfuls of water into your lips with trembling imprecision. You keep thinking you might have been poisoned, but know in the deepest mass inside of you, the rusted thing you’ve buried in grave dirt because you like to forget you are human, that this is just you. This is just you and your body reacting to two syllables you hardly believe are two syllables. 

The girl on the couch coughs herself awake, then stumbles to the bathroom, naked save for a lime green thong. You know her tattoos, her retreating back, the smell of her shampoo, but her name escapes you just now. Fingers find the inside of an unblemished arm, where no skin is scorched. 

People everywhere. Cockroaches. Young things you want, try to keep, _suffer the little children come unto me_ but you are realizing that they were never anything you thought they were. They can come and go, you can lose them in bunches and survive the aching loss of that, but only because you thought you would still always have Jade, who you’re realizing that you never had.

They are all Jade, the million things making up the one, big, living Jade substitute you can never complete because you do not even know him well enough anymore to create a passable replica.  
You realize that they never existed independently; they were never self-actualized. They were only the insects swarming Jade’s corpse, this thing so decayed and hideous and unrecognizable because you, you _refused to let it die_. You refused to let it go, even as it fell apart, dissolved into the rot and fluids and gasses left after rigor has set in then passed. 

And now they are scattering. Cockroaches under a light, leaving you one by one for a darkness you can no longer provide, because maybe darkness was never yours to offer in the first place. 

You used to think that you were fleeing a light cast by fame, by society, by something external, something you were apart from. But what if it was inside of you this whole time? What if you have been cloaking the very thing you hate beneath your veneer of darkness, stifling the light you denied, rejected, condemned, under shrouds of Sorrow? What if you _are_ everything you hate, the mundane and marriage and stability? What if _that_ has been reality all a long, and you, _you_ were the artifice? 

Enough time passes that when he does come downstairs to find you, you know he didn’t want to. It doesn’t matter. He is not real, or self-actualized. He is just an insect in the body you still dress and feed and fuck because you refuse to accept death, when all along you thought death was something you understood better than anyone, better than life. 

And then it comes together. Everyone is getting older. All of your insects and the corpse they inhabit, spinning chrysalises and falling to dust. But you, you are not. You are holding on with a steel grip and gritted teeth and such a complex, intricate denial that you didn’t even recognize it for what it was. You are not aging, while every single living thing around you is. And maybe you are the most afraid of death, when you thought you were the least. 

He sits down, and doesn’t ask you how you’re feeling, which is a relief. His face, narrow and old, is between his palms. “I’m tired, Dave.” He says, voice muffled and shaped into a small thing by his hands. 

“I know,” you say. “I’m sorry for all this.” 

He inhales raggedly. “It’s just as much my fault. All of it. We’re just fucked up,” he says. The _we_ implied in his statement, like you and him are unified by something, bothers you in this distant way, a splinter prickling in your side where it might grow into a true wound if you let it. For now, it’s not worth mentioning, though. You change the subject. 

“I was dreaming,” you tell him. 

“Nightmare? Wedding nightmare?” He tries to sneer but he seems too tired even for that. It comes out torn and deflated, a plastic bag battered by traffic on the freeway. 

“No,” you say carefully, rotating the glass of water around in an circle on the counter. “Actually, perhaps. Indirectly. I dreamt he was burning me, because I asked him to. Because when we die, there will be evidence, legal evidence, that he belonged to her. But nothing of me,” you explain, repulsed by your own self-pity. The words seem small and underdeveloped where they hang in the air between you, and you wish you hadn’t said them. 

He scoffs. “There’s a whole fucking musical manifesto to it, Dave.” 

“One that only I understand,” you say, knowing that should be all that matters. But it isn’t, because you are an artist, and artists need to immortalize their suffering in order to exist. Without immortality, artists are just humans, and you abhor humanity. 

However, it is your immortality that’s driving everyone away. It is your refusal to be human, to age, to grow up. Everything feels convoluted beyond repair, a cord so tangled and frayed that you are ready to give up, make your bed and lie in it, atop this mess of knots. “I don’t know a single thing anymore,” you exhale. 

He laughs, gets up, and turns out the light. “You and me both, Dave.” 

\---

Your body is too tight for all of its pain, and you feel even more like a thing caught in stages of transition than you did before, hyperaware of your tadpole tail, your lack of legs, your inability to grow into a creature that walks. The weddings are cropping up like cancers around you. Like toadstools, ugly and slime-slicked and grey in their half-moon formations on die-cut emerald lawns, appearing overnight as if they always belonged there. 

Everyone around you is either leaving you or getting married, which is the same as leaving you. 

The time they can spend licking your wounds and changing your tank water so that your tadpole tail has something clean to propel you through disappears. Gives way to their new lovers or their new bands, their wedding plans and wives. And you remain. Unable to contain the growing heart inside of you, unable to fill the hole with earth at the rate it is expanding into this chasm swallowing your old self whole. 

You shovel and shovel with black hands, you wipe sweat from your brow and mourn your broken limbs. And you embark upon the impossible task of rewriting your history so that Jade was never yours, instead of something that was yours but you lost along the way. For the last few years, you’ve come to believe that everything you ever were together had corroded, had sank into the pacific. But still, once was golden, once was the massive hull of an ocean liner whose sails still swayed against the horizon as they sank to some kind of glory. Something once, but no longer, beautiful. 

Now you are trying to bury this idea. Break it into pieces and restructure it into something new, something functional and without beauty. You are trying to decide what he truly is to you, what he’s been all these years if he was not yours, and he was not your love, but only a lover. 

You spend most time inside your house, staring at the corners of your room. These intimate places where walls meet under the guise of sterility. You try and tell yourself that it is not a guise. That things don’t mean more than they actually do, that metaphor is a construct. The blinds and windows are shut, creating an oppressive heat and darkness for you to lie in, wakeful, suffocated in your own fear and anxiety. It becomes difficult to tell when morning becomes day becomes night, but you think it might be dusk on a Sunday when you realize with a stark, biting clarity what he really is, what he was first and foremost and what he will _always_ be, if not your love. 

Jade is nothing but a person you wrote songs with. That is all. And that collaboration was so beautiful and consummate and life changing ten years ago, that you mistook the person you wrote songs with for the sun of your solar system. 

You sit up in your grave of a bed, choking on the air you’ve shut yourself into. Jade is a person you can _still_ write songs with, if you try. Everything else between you he might have written the letters to kill, but this is where it originated. This is what he was before you made him into an ocean liner, before you forced him into the prison of beauty he finally broke free from, twisting into a vine of inevitable adulthood while you sobbed and shook and clung to the idea of endlessness because you are so, so afraid of growing old. 

And it seems simple, what you must do now. 

\---

Jade’s house looks like it belongs on the block, and for the first time in the history of him living here you don’t question this. You don’t think of his darkness as an inkblot staining the suburbs with the cancer you created. You don’t think that he is lying to himself and to everyone around him, to the neat porch and its porch swing, to the flower boxes that need weeding and the lawn he wastes money and water to keep the color of an emerald. 

Most strikingly, you do not think he should come back to you with his tail between his legs, starvation-frail and ashamed so that you can stand upon your moral high ground and watch him drown. You don’t think any of these things. He is an adult, and he is getting married. He was never an ocean liner, you only saw him that way. You don’t believe all of this all of the time yet, but you do right now, and that is something. 

When he opens the door, his face falls because he thinks you are going to fight. He thinks you are going to force your body inside the frame of his home and scream and put your hands in his shirt until he admits he was wrong about everything. And because this is a thing you do, the dance you’ve been perfecting for the better part of a decade, a brief longing to do just what he expects courses through you like fever. You could do it, and it might work. He might renounce every word of those letters, he might cancel the wedding and come tumbling back to your illusion of darkness one more time. 

But that would only be true for so long. One can only believe is he an ship for so long before the ocean recedes, leaving him a man on a sidewalk in the suburbs, with flower boxes to weed and bills to pay and a dog to feed and a wife who loves him in the way adults love, a man dreaming of a time ten years ago when love was a thing that could leave him in ribbons. But now you know that maybe Jade never wanted to lead that existence. That perhaps you can live and breathe and die as ribbons, but everyone else around you is human, and everyone else around you wants to be sewn back up into a whole again. 

“I’m not here to fight,” you tell him immediately, holding your hand up like a white flag between you. Your voice sounds like you have been dead a very long time. 

His brow crumples, and he seems very unsure. The door is still half shut, and he is blocking the narrow window of space, so that you cannot even see into this life he leads without you. You realize you don’t want to, because it is more real than you ever gave it credit for and you have no place in his reality anymore. 

“The last time we spoke you screamed at me over the phone. So, sorry if I seem suspicious,” Jade says dryly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, leaning against the wall. His eyes are guarded and dark, and you want him to be a something you can crawl inside. You want him to be the cave of black you retreat from your pain into, but he _is_ your pain and he is not your love and he never was so you must stand, and continue breathing. 

Your face must bely your insides, because his gaze softens. “And I am relieved to see you,” he says, rubbing his palm over his mouth as he talks. “I was worried.” 

You shake your head. “I need to write,” is what you say. 

Tension suddenly crackles between you, because maybe art is more than love. Maybe they are the same thing and you are kidding yourself by believing you can rewrite what happened between you so that this becomes a thing you can bury. You’re not sure. Then, your hand is on his shoulder, resting there shaking as you try desperately to breathe through the threat of tears. 

He pulls you towards him, and you don’t kiss, but this is not what you imagined when you imagined life after his wedding. His hands touch you all over, and his hair falls into his face. The streets of the suburbs watch silently from behind you, and it seems impossible and incredible that you can exist here. Your eyes close, and you suck his breath into your lungs. 

“Okay. Okay. We can do that. I can do that,” he says, sounding unsure, but holding onto your biceps nonetheless. It feels strange to not hurt him. It feels strange to not want to hurt him. It feels like letting a single boat in your massive fleet of long-suffered spite go sailing over the edge of the world. 

The chasm you are piling earth into is not full. It is not even close to being full, and breathing is still something voluntary and forced, but you think that perhaps the vacancy has at least stopped growing. And at least in this moment, you feel ready to accept that you are beginning the formal inhumation of everything you ever imagined you were together, and inhumation is more than Death. It is not dying, but letting the dead go.

“Okay,” you echo, pulling away from him with his taste on your tongue your whole body shivering with something new, because Death is cyclical, and something, something _must_ come after. “Let’s make an album.”


End file.
